Campaign around Digital Transformation

Ginger described how SAP planned to reach its current customers and prospects with a thought-leadership campaign to help executives develop a deeper understanding of Digital Transformation trends. She noted: “Digital transformation is all around us. By 2020 it’s expected that 4 billion people will have internet access. There will be 6.1 billion smartphones in use. 50 billion smart objects will be connected to the internet.” The campaign content was built around executive research, supplemented by the latest thinking from executive peers and industry experts, and packaged in a consumable conversational format.

Audience

Ginger noted that key influencers for technology are increasingly found outside of IT: “It wasn’t enough to target just the office of the CIO, we had to appeal simultaneously to the departments of the COO and CFO. Plus, new titles were popping up, like Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, and Chief Digital Officer. These also were our targets.”

She said: “Because we chose digital as our medium, we knew that we would have a broad distribution. Therefore, we had to frame the message in such a way as to be inclusive of the total workforce, not just the decision makers and key influencers, but also the employees who would be affected by those decisions and who function in an advisory capacity. And because of that, we knew we had to speak their language so that they would amplify our message up the decision chain within their organizations.” Ginger mentioned that, as needed, they would tap into SAP’s Industry Value Advisors (specialists with an average of 20 years in an industry) or Technology Specialists to assist in shaping the content to appeal to the target customers.

Content Strategy

Ginger described how they started with a white paper co-authored by SAP’s CEO and Chief Transformation Officer on “value creation in a digital economy.” She described this asset as “the mother-load of information and it was always gated. No one got it for free.” She said “you don’t have to tell visitors everything you know up front. The big piece of information is always gated, we never give it away. The smaller content pieces derive from this big piece and lead you one of two ways, either to another piece of un-gated content, or to the gated content. By the time people go for the gated content, they are very committed and highly qualified. There’s your demand generation. All the rest are still exposed to your thought leadership. It’s a win-win.”

She described how they versioned that single white paper into 25 industry-specific assets. Next they created 10-20 blogs, 2 infographics, 5 tweet cards, and podcasts, videos, and webinars from each industry paper.

She said: “Working with our industry sales team, we created pitch decks to explain SAP’s Digital Transformation story to each industry, a “TED Talk”, a one-page summary, 25 industry-specific white boards to train the sales team, and 25 value surveys to see where people were in their digital journey. Thus, our single white paper spawned in excess of 650 snack-able, socially sharable, digitally native content pieces!” They also leveraged MOOCs: “Because we knew we had to connect with prospects who had never had a relationship with SAP, we had to establish ourselves firmly as thought leaders. The key to this began in 2013 when SAP started openSAP, an Enterprise MOOC platform for massive open online courses (MOOC), hosted at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and provided to the public free of charge. While the MOOC concept is already popular in academia, SAP is one of the first companies to adopt it for business-related training purposes. We worked with openSAP to develop separate sets of courses focused on digital transformation and tailored for IT Users, IT Leaders, and Business Leaders.”

Results

Ginger said they typically analyze the results of such campaigns under the sub-categories of “Reach”, “Engage”, “Act” and “Convert”. She shared the results of the “Digital Transformation” campaign, which were as follows:

Reach

96,000+ Blog views across 25 industries and 2 lines of business
26,600,000+ Social media impressions
43,708 Unique contacts from 14,200+ different companies

Act

Convert

The Future: Web Documentaries

We asked Ginger where she sees these trends heading. She said given her research on different modes of consuming information and the digital environment, she would love to explore a web documentary. “A web documentary makes use of a full complement of multimedia tools. Visitors learn about our history, our products, our services, our customers, our brand. But they do it by clicking here, reading there, listening some other place, scrolling and hovering and watching. Web Documentaries are to Web Sites what Prezi is to PowerPoint. They’re amazing. They’re interactive. They’re non-linear. They’re real time. And since they’re interactive, the narrative advances through the actions taken by the users. Get it? The user determines the journey! The whole point is that user participation is the key element that gives meaning to this new audiovisual genre. Now how stinking cool is that? And if that weren’t cool enough, you can re-purpose existing content in order to make new content.” Ginger said she has not seen such a documentary done to date for commercial purposes, but she’d “love to take on the challenge!”

I have sold multi-million dollar enterprise deals to some of the largest companies in the world; managed high volume transactional SaaS teams, developed & managed channel strategies / partners, sold internationally and been through a couple acquisitions. I have not “seen and done it all”, but I have done quite a few things.

Shastri is a writer and consults with several companies in technology marketing and customer success. He has written many articles for the Huffington Post and Washington Post, and is a guest content contributor for Ziff Davis B2B.

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